


silence; books must be returned no later than the date shown; do not interfere with the nature of causality

by brawltogethernow



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Homestuck
Genre: Crossover, Dimension Travel, F/F, Gen, Libraries, Meteorstuck, flighty broads and their snarky horseshit, fun and/or sacrilege with tenses, trashy alien romance novels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 23:23:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1666280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawltogethernow/pseuds/brawltogethernow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you construct a library, anyone can wander in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	silence; books must be returned no later than the date shown; do not interfere with the nature of causality

All libraries, as you know, are interconnected through L-space.

     The mass of the knowledge in a library drags on reality like a weight on a saggy trampoline, allowing metaphor to be extended a bit —other literary devices complain that it is often given such leeway— with the result that a dense collection of sufficiently quality books forms a kind of singularity. Different examples of this phenomena overlap and, in some senses, occupy one point exempt from the rules of space and time. Every instance of every library there has ever been, some merely potential, are connected through the same vast singularity of knowledge through which pop culture references might travel to the right kind of universe interminably laboring within the trends of 2009.

     A casual wanderer can experience distortions of time and space in an adequately stocked library. A more-than-casual wanderer can get very satisfyingly lost.1 What takes true skill is navigating such distortions. It is wise to bring rations, and perhaps a ball of string.  
-  
1 In certain cultures this is in fact a way of exiling troublesome community members, who are packed off with the sentiment that if they don’t die they will at least find their way to where they will be somebody else’s problem.  
-

 

The Librarian tread carefully through the B shelves, the occupants of which were chained down and rattled slightly. He made a point of plumbing the fuzzier potential pathways of the Unseen University library his every third official day off, a day he rarely took anyway but which was grandfathered into the terms of his employment. Rarely ever one to leave his books unguarded, the Librarian had grown nothing if not more protective after the magical accident that transformed him into a large, orange orangutan. If anything the event had left him better equipped for excursions into the more nebulous permutations of L-space-based travel. The Librarian paused, and extended a foot delicately, an action which in an ape results in a sort of dangling effect. Having walked a straight line for half an hour, it was his fourth time passing by the B section. The rustling of the books in his fourth encounter with the B shelves meant—

   —The Librarian’s multi-jointed toe touches a jewel-toned rug. Around him, the shelves have surreptitiously faded to a flat, iron gray. The Librarian hoots quietly and withdraws the foot backward. It’s always wise to be cautious surveying new territory.

     A voice filters through the shelves, the way sounds do in libraries. “I do not see why you are so set on making the shelves quite so twisty and compact,” says the voice, placing its syllables meticulously. There is a pause, as the voice draws back in assessing silence. “We have a lot of space. And not that many books.”

     “The way I see it, Kanaya,” says a second voice, speaking with a level of fondness difficult to gauge due to what sounds like natural background levels of sardonic and reproving, “books weren’t made to be stored in a way that’s user-friendly. Besides, there are lots of books around the labs.”

     “Most of them are books on programming.”

     “Your point?”

     The Librarian squints consideringly at an orange volume to his right, marked with a caret and a carrot.

     “It just strikes me as an unusual pet project to attempt to implement on this one day when you are, magnificently, not drunk.”

     The conversation pauses, then restarts almost imperceptibly, before the second voice responds. “Kanaya, in regards to my recent ah, lapses, I would like to say…”

     “You misunderstand. My utilization of human sarcasm was not meant to be implemented in such a way as could be interpreted that I am not…glad, really.”

     The second voice _hmmph_ s, and then launches back into the conversation with new energy: “Besides, this pertains to some reading I’ve been doing regarding quantum attractions between bodies of knowledge-mass in spacetime—”

     The Librarian _ook_ s in understanding, a dabbler in space and time himself.

     “I thought you were reading those trashy romance novels.”

     In the stacks, a third voice, this one not directly concerned with the nuances of bibliothecal spacetime, is muttering to itself:

     “Maybe with a sort of _libraries, jive with these, something something proprieties, blah blah blah, an aspiring linguist’s wet dream—_ man, I could really use a beat.”

     An obliging soul, the Librarian taps into the universal constants to engage in the ancient art known as “beat boxing.”

     “Yesss, thank you,” says the occupied voice to the library in general. “ _–Tomes stacked precarious, travel you ask, why, it’s perilous, like cans in a town square, I’m just saying be aware of the air they can snare ‘less of course you’re down with the Heir_ —See what I did there. Not that he’s here or anything. But _–you cannot deny that our troop when assembled is so fly, sweet fist bumps to make you cry, science-crazy frog girls—_ Huh wait. Maybe it should be dog now…. Whatever—can I get a woof woof up in here?”

     At this point, the first voices return to prevalence, emanating from a slightly different position within the shelves.

     “Kanaya?”

     “Hmm.”

     “While he’s at a slow point, I was just wondering— Do you hear a decidedly simian backbeat to my brother’s ‘raps’?”

     The Librarian’s rhythm of _ook_ s and chest beats cuts off abruptly.

     “What,” says the muttering voice, for the first time at full volume, with the distinct change in tone of someone who has just started paying attention to their surroundings. “Rose. Are you saying, are you actually insinuating, that a—”

     The mulitverse holds its breath.

     “—primate has seen fit to back up my admittedly totally deserving verbal grinding, while like, on a break from brachiating through your ridiculous complex of shelves.”

     “I would not eliminate the possibility.

     This time there is a longer silence.

     At last, the meticulous voice says, “Huh.”

     An experienced traveler in space and time learns to judge when it is best to extricate oneself from an inert situation while it is still an inert situation. The librarian pads backward across the bright carpet, softly, questing for the recognizable change in air pressure and verb tense that means home, snagging a copy of _Red and Black in the Space Corsairegulator’s Seraglio_ on his way.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an aspiring spectacularmathon a friend and I staged during a past HS hiatus to keep ourselves occupied, the criteria being that there had to be fanfic, it had to cross Homestuck over with something, and there were no regulations for length, quality, or mechanics of crossover. We abandoned it almost immediately, but not before I dashed this off.


End file.
